What is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is developed so that marketing and sales teams can align around companies that are the best fit for your product or service. Many data-driven salespeople and marketers often create their ICP as a critical first step in personalizing their company’s messaging and driving more revenue.

Identifying an ICP is a blueprint for helping your team understand how they will approach marketing, sales, customer service and other key elements of driving revenue at your organization. Here are some important components of any ICP:

Past sales wins: A lot of companies look to their past sales successes as a best practice when developing their ICPs. It’s a great foundation for you to begin new market and industry expansion. And, knowing what helped you close more deals in the past can lend a hand when attempting to close new deals in the future.

Firmographics and demographics: After you compile the attributes of your past sales wins that ended up in closed deals, you need to include the firmographics and demographics of your ICP. These include employee size, revenue, industry and geographic locations. These basics will also help you build the foundation of your ICP so that you can start to explore new industries, markets and companies.

Unique insights: Your ICP doesn’t end with basics like firmographics, demographics and past sales wins. In order to promote more growth, you must also look forward, and that includes unique insights. These can include everything from technology sophistication to hiring patterns. As sales data grows more sophisticated, teams are leaning on AI solutions to gather and sort these unique insights for them in order to stay competitive.

High-Growth ICPs Require AI Solutions

Once your company has determined your ICP, you need to be able to build upon it in a meaningful way. This is where B2B sales and marketing solutions can really take your data-driven prospecting and sales game to the next level. Using your unique ICP, a platform like EverString can then generate thousands of companies that look like the ideal customer you’ve already built. Armed with data about these companies in a easy-to-use platform, sales reps can spend more time reaching out to the right accounts and less time scouring the web for companies that may or may not be the right fit.

ICPs are simple: They are the “who” behind your teams’ past and future sales and marketing successes. To see how your teams can build an accurate, actionable ICP, try out EverString for free with a 7-day trial.